Gib Olander’s Local Viewpoints Gets Business Feedback, Reviews

Former Localeze business develoment guy Gib Olander is back in the game, this time switching his focus from local business listings innovation to maximizing effective local business reviews. Think of a variation of “Net Promoter Scores” for local business.

Olander’s new company, Local Viewpoints has won seed funding from Wavetable Labs. It launched at the end of March, starting with four sales people hitting businesses up in hometown Chicago, as well as other markets.

The company basically sends out a short survey after customers shop a location, providing instant feedback to the location, analytics (time of day, products purchased) and most importantly, an online review . The surveys take about a minute to complete.

Seventy-five businesses are currently subscribing to the service, which is $299 a year. Business categories range from chiropractors to furniture stores to plumbers to high-end restaurants.

“We’re trying to bridge together all the forms of customer feedback” and measuring customer satisfaction, including online reviews and customer feedback, says Olander. The problems with other sources is that customer feedback simply isn’t being captured, he adds. Just six percent of consumers are willing to write reviews. With the world going mobile, and everyone being just seconds away from providing feedback, however, there really are no excuses.

Local Viewpoints, of course, is not the only company focused on driving up reviews via short response surveys. We’ve recently covered the efforts by SupportLocal to drive up local business recommendations via a fast-paced, 27-question local recommendations page.

Here’s an interesting InfoGraph that Local Viewpoints has put together about the Word of Mouth space.